The Sun Down Motel(4)
Her voice, when she finally spoke, was flat, without inflection. “Vivian is dead,” she said. She put down the clipping and got up and left the room.
I never asked Mom about it again.
* * *
? ? ?
It was only after Mom died that I got mad. Not at Mom, really—she was a teenager when Viv disappeared, and there wasn’t much she could have done. But what about everyone else? The cops? The locals? Viv’s parents? Why hadn’t there been a statewide search? Why had Viv been allowed to vanish into nothingness with barely a ripple?
The first person I asked was Graham, who was older and remembered more than I did. “Grandma and Granddad were divorced by then,” Graham said. “When Viv disappeared, Grandma was a single mother.”
“So? That meant she didn’t look for her daughter? Granddad, either?”
Graham shrugged. “Grandma didn’t have much money. And Mom told me that she and Viv used to fight all the time. They didn’t get along at all.”
I’d stared at him, shocked. We were sitting in my mother’s rental apartment, in the middle of boxing up her things. We were taking a break and eating takeout. “Mom told you that? She never told me that.”
My brother shrugged again, leaning back on a box and scrolling through his phone. “They didn’t have the Internet back then, or DNA. If you wanted to find a missing person, you had to get in your car and go driving around looking for them. Grandma couldn’t take time off work and go to Fell. And Granddad was already remarried. I don’t think he cared about any of them all that much.”
It was true. Mom hadn’t had a good relationship with her father, who had left their family to sink or swim. She hadn’t even gone to his funeral. “What about the cops, though?” I said.
Graham put his phone down briefly and thought it over. “Well, Viv had already left home, and she was twenty,” he said. “I guess they thought she’d just taken off somewhere.” He looked at me. “You’re really into this, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m really into this. They didn’t even find a body. It isn’t 1982 anymore. We have the Internet and DNA now. Maybe something can be done.”
“By you?”
Yes, by me. There didn’t seem to be anyone else. And now that Mom was gone, I could ask all the questions I wanted without hurting her feelings. Mom had taken all of her memories of Viv with her when she died, and I’d never hear them. My anger at that was helpless, something that the therapists and counselors said I needed to work through. But my anger at everyone else, my outrage that my aunt’s likely abduction and death were written off as just something that happened—I could work through that by coming to Fell and getting my own answers.
I clicked the other scanned article I had on my computer. It was headlined simply MISSING GIRL STILL NOT FOUND. The details were sketchy: Viv was twenty; she had been in Fell for three months; she worked at the Sun Down Motel on the night shift. She’d gone to work and disappeared sometime in the middle of her shift, leaving behind her car, her purse, and her belongings. Her roommate, a girl named Jenny Summers, said Viv was “a nice person, easy to get along with.” She was also described—by who was not cited—as “pretty and vivacious.” She had no boyfriend that anyone knew of. She was not into drugs, alcohol, or prostitution that anyone could tell. Her mother—my grandmother—was quoted as being “worried sick.”
She was a beautiful girl, gone.
On foot. Without any money.
Vivian is dead.
Viv’s case hadn’t received national or even statewide media attention. The local Fell newspapers weren’t digitized—they were still physically archived in the Fell library. When I started digging, all I found were true-crime blogs and Reddit threads by armchair detectives. None of the blogs or threads were about Vivian, but a lot of them were about Fell. Because Fell, it turned out, had more than one unsolved murder. For such a small place, it was a true-crime buff’s paradise.
The second article was in Mom’s belongings. I’d found it when I’d gone through her dresser after she died, tucked in an envelope in the back of a drawer. The envelope was white, crisp, brand-new. Written on the back, in Mom’s lovely handwriting, was: 27 Greville Street, apartment C.
Viv’s address, maybe? The piece of newsprint inside the envelope was nearly disintegrating, so I’d scanned it and added it to the first one I found.
Vivian is dead.
Mom had wanted no memories of her sister, no discussion of her, and yet she’d kept this article for thirty-five years, along with the address. She’d even put it in a new envelope sometime recently, recopied the address, which meant she’d at least pulled the article out of the old envelope, maybe read it again.
Viv was real. She wasn’t a spooky tale or a ghost story. She had been real, she had been Mom’s sister—and somehow, looking at that crisp white envelope, I knew she had mattered to Mom, a lot, in a way I had lost my chance to understand.
This was all I had: two newspaper articles and a memory of grief. Except now I had more than that. I had a little money and I had a very clear map from Illinois to Fell, New York. I had an address for Viv’s apartment, maybe, and the Sun Down Motel. I had no boyfriend and a college career I had no passion for. I had a car and so few belongings that they fit into the back seat. I was twenty, and I still hadn’t started my life yet. Just like Viv hadn’t.